Communicating Construction Safety in a Simulation Environment in Israel Using EON Reality Solutions

IRVINE, Calif., June 9, 2010 – EON Reality, the world’s leading interactive 3D software provider, today announced the installation of an immersive Virtual Reality environment, the EON Icube, at the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, as a part of a Virtual Construction project. The immersive laboratory will serve as a simulator for constructors to train for potential dangers and learn how take precautions in their day to day work.

A wide range of experiments and learning can be accomplished in a simulation lab in order to increase workers’ safety and the safety in buildings that otherwise would take a great deal of time, danger and expense to recreate at a construction site. The Civil Engineering Faculty at the Technion in Israel partners with construction companies and the Ministry of Labor to develop safety simulations for constructors and for testing of a novel computer system to guide work teams through buildings.

Associate Professor Rafael Sacks at the Faculty of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Technion has many years of industrial experience in structural engineering design and software development for the construction industry. “The construction industry worldwide is considered to be far more dangerous than most other industries. In many countries about half of industrial accidents that cause death are in the construction industry.”

The aim is to develop a “discrete event simulation” for operation control and operation simulation where a number of steps in a process can be calculated in order to help study relationship between the workers. The first study will involve the practice of dangerous situations in the simulator, where people can train dangerous tasks, observe and make mistakes. The second phase of the research will be to study workers’ perception of danger in a cube environment.

“In the EON Icube we can recreate the activities on a construction site, we can add avatars and interactivity to create a virtual environment that corresponds to a real work environment,” said Professor Rafael Sacks. “By simulating dangerous situations we can study how construction workers perceive hazards in their every day work. Workers can learn to identify and understand specific dangers that they generally are not aware of. This type of research relates to industrial psychology and has significant value when it comes to evaluating stressful situations and when there is an inclination to take unnecessary risks due to concerns for productivity,” continued Professor Sacks.

Similar projects have been conducted in a cave environment at the University of Reading in England. “We collaborate to bring architects and designers together with safety experts into the cube environment”, Professor Sacks said. “They walk through the 3D building and can discuss possible problems in order to improve the design so that the buildings can be built and function safer”. He mentioned other types of simulation programs to be conducted in the Icube environment such as emergency relief training in case of an earthquake. “We have the structural knowledge and the engineering capacity to simulate what will happen to a typical apartment building if it were to collapse in case of an earthquake. We can train emergency relief teams to learn how to navigate and identify where people might be trapped in a collapsed building.”

About the TechnionTechnion – Israel Institute of Technology is a prestigious and leading science and technology university in Israel. Its mission is to be among the best in the world in developing leading-edge technologies and educating engineers and scientists to be the leaders in implementing state-of-the-art know-how in Israel. For further information, visit www1.technion.ac.il/en.About EON Reality EON Reality, Inc. is the world’s leading interactive 3D visual content management and virtual reality software provider. Industry leaders, including Atlas Copco, Bechtel, Boeing, Bombardier, Hon, Intel, Lexus, Lufthansa-Teknik, Peterbilt, Samsung, Siemens Medical, Suzuki, Toyota and Whirlpool, use EON solutions to enhance the interactive user experience to effectively increase sales, better communicate product functionality and decrease the cost of service, training and technical support. For further information, visit www.eonreality.com.